The Forgotten Plants of Eco Gardening
by John Creasy
In my last post I outlined the most commonly listed categories that permaculturists use when understanding the roll a certain plant plays in a community of plants. We call this study of plants “niche analysis.” The categories that I listed are primary producer, pollinator, beneficial insect attractor, nitrogen fixer, pest confuser, dynamic accumulator, mulch plants and ground covers. Go back and read my previous post from last Friday to learn more about these categories.
There’s one category that is left out of our niche analysis. It’s a really important category from the perspective of ecological restoration and biodiversity but it may seem unimportant or counter-productive for food production. In permaculture we’re committed to both restoring ecological systems and growing the food we need. Because of this twofold commitment we can’t ignore this category of plants that primarily supports biodiversity, though I’ll also show how these plants support our food production too. While some plants support pollinator populations and other plants attract predatory insects there’s another category of native plants that provide the vegetative food at the base of the ecosystem food web. For now I’m using Douglas Tallamy’s term, “keystone plants.”
I recently heard Tallamy talk about the problem of planting only pollinator plants. Its great to support pollinators, and in permaculture this helps us get more fruits from our trees, shrubs and garden plants. But pollinators are not the only insects that need support in our degraded ecosystems. Some insects need certain plants so they can eat those plants. The relationship between milkweed and monarch butterflies is a great example of a plant and butterfly relationship, but there are many hundreds of species of moths and butterflies that all need the right plants.
Our guilds (the plant communities that we create) are often designed to repel the insects that eat plant leaves, and yet, from an ecological perspective, these insects, especially moths and butterflies, are crucial to the food chain. Lepidoptera (moths and butterflies) eat leaves and then are eaten themselves by birds, larger insects, bats and many other creatures. Moths and butterflies and the plants that they eat are the foundation of our food web. The consumption of green plants by moths and butterflies move the energy in those plants up the food chain and into the air via birds and bats.
The Clouded Sulfur on Joe Pye Weed near my home.
So, how do we grow lots of food and support Lepidoptera species? If we do this are we just inviting pests into our gardens? Or are there benefits to having a diversity of moths and butterflies in our gardens and among our fruit trees? For me, there is no question that the right thing to do in our day is plant things that will feed moths and butterflies. Biodiversity is decreasing at alarming rates, especially among the Lepidoptera species. According to a research article in Science:
“Between 2000 and 2020, total butterfly abundance fell by 22% across the 554 recorded species. Species-level declines were widespread, with 13 times as many species declining as increasing.”1
That’s a decline across the board, affecting almost all species of moths and butterflies. And we see it, there are fewer and fewer fluttering wings around us each summer and therefore fewer bird species.
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Pearl Crescent Butterfly. While the adults use the pollen from many native plants the eggs are laid on plants in the aster family and the larva eat the aster leaves.
The good news? As Bill Mollison, the co-founder of the modern permaculture movement, would say… “the problems of the world are increasingly complex but the solutions remain embarrassingly simple.” He was right. I could research and write all day about the complexities of both ecosystems and human destruction of those complex ecosystems but I think I can explain the solution in just a few sentences. Plant native plants to create a balanced ecosystem. Ok, it just took one sentence.
There are actually huge benefits to attracting native Lepidoptera to your food forest, your orchard and your garden. We need not worry that we’re attracting insects that will eat our food crops, we’ve already done that by planting the food crops themselves! Cabbage worms eat cabbage, apple maggots eat apples and so on. What we’re not doing is supporting the beneficial insects that eat those pests if we’re not supporting a balanced ecosystem that supports other species very similar to the pest species. For instance, we plant “beneficial insect attracting” plants around our apple trees at the farm. But, those beneficial insects that parasitize moth larva need moth larva every year and in high numbers. When the pest species show up we want the populations of the beneficial parasitic wasps to be healthy and ready to pounce. We create this kind of dynamic ecosystem by attracting all sorts of native moths and butterflies into our permaculture landscapes. Then, when the pests show up there’s already an ecosystem ready to keep them in check. At least that’s our goal in permaculture design, creating managed and balanced ecosystems.
When our landscapes are diverse with native flora we can rest assured that balance of beneficial and “pest” species will be kept in check. We should also remember that apples, pears and peaches aren’t native trees. The moths that attack them are not native species. The plants that support native Lepidoptera are not plants that attract the invasive pests that consume our beloved fruit trees!
At Garfield Community Farm we’ve planted two native plants that have both begun supporting native moths and butterflies. The first are our fifteen or so pawpaw trees spread throughout the food forest. We’re now sharing our tree with the very rare Zebra Swallowtail butterfly! That means these butterflies are eating some of the leaves of our trees and we’re more than ok with that. Another species that we've planted a lot of for its ability to fix nitrogen is Amorpha fruiticosa, aka wild indigo shrub or river locust. These shrubs also host the larva of California & southern dogfaces, Silver-spotted Skipper (Epargyreus clarus), Gray hairstreak and Hoary edge skipper. Just last week my co-worker, AJ, found our first Gray hairstreak fluttering around the farm.
According to Douglas Tallamy there are “keystone species” in every eco-region. These are the plants that support the high diversity of native Lepidoptera. According to the National Wildlife Federation “The research of entomologist, Dr. Doug Tallamy, and his team at the University of Delaware have identified 14% of native plants (the keystones) support 90% of butterfly and moth lepidoptera species.”2 In the north eastern United States some of the species of plants we should plant, or just encourage, are some of the easiest plants to grow! They include:
All species of native goldenrod, Solidago
All species of native strawberry, Fragaria (this was very surprising for me to find!)
Native sunflowers, Helianthus
Joe Pye Weed, Eupatorium (a beautiful native plant that is easy to grow).
The above plants are the top four keystone species according to the National Wildlife Federation. I called this article “The Forgotten Plants,” but these four species aren’t really forgotten at all, they’re just not used enough or appreciated for their amazing ability to support ecosystem health. There are many plants that support lepidoptera species, so plant a diversity, but don’t forget goldenrod. According to Tallamy, goldenrods support 126 different species! The next best native plants are the strawberries which support 77. Beyond these four herbaceous perennials there are certain native trees that also support a much higher diversity of munching moth and butterfly larva. The best tree to plant is unquestionable… oak.
Oak trees support over 500 species of Lepidoptera! So even better than planting your keystone species in the herbaceous layer of your food forest maybe plant an oak tree if you have the space. There are over a dozen native oak species in the north east, each species supports a huge variety of moths.
Rapid butterfly declines across the United States during the 21st century. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adp4671
National Wildlife Federation. https://www.nwf.org/Native-Plant-Habitats/Plant-Native/Why-Native/Keystone-Plants-by-Ecoregion
How to Make Room for Growth and Dwelling
John came to Washington this week for a Presbyterian church training, followed by a hike in the Hoh rainforest and Olympic mountains. Downtown Tacoma, and the sublime sights along the Pacific coast.
This trip also gave us the chance to visit, work on some things, and also see some humbler sights closer to my home in Olympia. Like mountains and glaciers, resoundingly impressive, living.
Before we dug in on Monday morning to get organized on fall fundraising for WIG, we walked over to see the community garden and tiny-home village at Westminster Presbyterian in Olympia. Would you nice walking stick for the five minute walk there!
Such a hidden treasure-you and your church might want to sell everything, and buy a field like this one. Such a precious pearl-you might want to scrap all your cherished accomplishments and belongings, and measure your life-if measure you must-by the life of a place like Hope Village and the “Garden of Weedin”.
Hope village is a tiny-home community hosted on the church’s property. From was I can see looking in as an outsider, the church has taken a cooperative but firm approach with the city and neighborhood in making room for this place and the people who live there. I think they have worked hard to create a process to help people lacking secure shelter find a place here. Of course, one would need to ask the residents directly about their experience, if they agreed to discuss the place.
It also appears well-ordered, dignified, and beautified. It is visible but set back. The homes dwell in the shade of grand trees, such as douglas fir, big-leaf maple, western hemlock, and the largest pacific dogwood I have ever seen.
I would expect this has an ecological design benefit. The location under the trees helps moderate the temperature, providing a place of cool shelter on the bright sunny days of the summer (and a softening of the long rainy season.)
And I imagine that the shelter of the trees carries a deeper meaning, something less able to be spoken, something like the psalms evokes “the one who dwells in the shelter of the most high/abides in the shade of the almighty.” Sublime imagery of a divine presence marked by providing a terrain, a space of humble, safe-enough everyday dwelling.
On that same terrain, in this shared space with the village we encounter and enter the ‘Garden of Weedin.’
Here we are crossing through the gate to the inside, the sheltered garden. Not only is that like unto an image of Mary the mother of God, but it is also like a fundamental process of living systems, a distinction between self and environment. The fence keeps the herbivorous animals out of the food-gardens (the rabbits and black-tailed deer would love to sample these tender goodies, but suburban olympia provides them plenty of food!).
And it worth thinking about this fence, and rules for the gardening radicals, with reference to the Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom’s work on community based governance systems. Among her ‘8 Rules for Governing a Commons’ is that a community define and maintain boundaries.
Who has access and how, on what terms? Related to that, What does each member receive, and what are they expected to give? A community project will not succeed as a community if it is governed in an authoritarian, personality-driven fashion. But a free-for-all, laissez-faire ethic will not succeed either. This tends to be another place where community-projects falter-a failure to define boundaries, authority, rules, responsibility. (And it needs to be understood in the face of the prevailing libertarian outlooks that say things like communities and states can’t govern collective resources, therefore just privatize them because the market will more wisely steward them, or regulation hampers construction, or laws and morals hamper the rule of might from just taking it all.) That can be done with in egalitarian fashion with a light handed touch of hierarchy-but you can’t get around this. This is how communities can build power, confidence, dignity, beauty, terrains of life and generativity...not to mention specifically housing and food!
Now a community also requires some elders, guides, and managers. They may help people do what they do just by their different ways of providing presence, reassurance, or clarity. And they probably also helps settle disputes, connect people, find resources, set a tone, ensure fidelity to agreements that serve purpose and life. I tend to think if you can have a couple people who can share such a role, that can be beneficial. It is a lot to expect of one person to do-and having a distribution of authority and an expectation of succession helps guard the community and work from being tightly held by the manager-helper, as well as protect the manager-helper from being mis-used by a community that isn’t ‘pulling their weight.’
And I this year I have really been grateful to benefit from being a part of a garden community. I have had a vegetable garden most of my life, but this past year, we had to unexpectedly move house, and found myself without a garden. After some due winter moping about this, I got in touch with Sue, the garden coordinator at WPC (we go to church their some, in part because it is walkable, in part because of the good spirit of the place.) I offered to help with tasks like weeding, repairs, odd jobs. She offered me a garden bed, as one had just come open! My wife and I gladly accepted-and for $60 a year, we’ve had access to a drip-irrigated 4x18 raised bed. We are expected to donate at least 10% of our harvest to the local food bank (gardeners gather on sunday mornings to harvest) and participate in 4 work-days a year. I missed one, and am making it up in other ways.
surveys shady garden: rhubarb, strawberries, kale, lettuce, salsify, squash, winter cover cropping up, and welcome weeds!
One day I noticed a large pile of construction waste near my house as I walked to the garden to tend and harvest. I’d been looking for 6 ft of 2x4 lumber to repair the produce washing table, and had even put something in the church newsletter, but nothing yet. So I immediately texted the builder, who had done some final repairs on our apartment. He welcomed me to take whatever I wanted from the waste-pile. So, the garden drew gifts from beyond it’s immediate circles. And I was able to use some wood that might have gone to the landfill toward a purpose of repair. It gave a few more years to the wash table, and it let me exercise a desire, a need within, to give in a way that might contribute to the conditions of life and work for the garden.
But I am so grateful for the garden. When we moved, my wife and I went to evening prayer in the garden, where we met some people from church, heard a talk about the music of trees, and prayed. Like that evening, I’m grateful to continue to be part of something like this garden, to be able to contribute, ...and loosen the hold of some learned habits/compulsions to need to make things happen. (Hi there pastors and helping professionals...among others!)
I like to go over there just to sit for a few minutes in quiet, to look around and take in sights of the garden and the larger place at this moment in the changes of seasons, to play around in the garden bed, draw and sketch, pray, say thank you to god.
I’m grateful to tend, harvest, eat and donate: onions, peas, squash, peppers, spinach, lettuce, rhubarb, strawberries, black salsify, red beets, kohlrabi, endive, purslane, lambs quarters, plantain, st johns wort, dandelions, volunteer nut trees-all from less than 80 sq ft of garden.
I show up Sunday morning and find a taste of the Spirit as I help a few others pick, wash and pack for the food bank, and also pausing to notice the beauty around us. I’m so grateful to have this place to show-up with others in a a quiet way that is both effective and welcome, and that feels truer to who I am, the work I am drawn to-things you come to know when you ‘let your life speak.’
In May I connected an Episcopal church up on the Kitsap Peninsula to the garden coordinator here, so that they could see an example of a community garden and habitat that might impress the with some models and inspirations of energy for their own intentions to build a place of life and community and nourishment fit for their place and neighborhood. It helped them to see that what they hoped to build with their neighbors in their own setting was possible.
One thing they and I am more aware of now are the many retired people in both places who would love to have a vegetable garden, but don’t have room for gardens in their apartments or mobile-home courts.
How can a church with a little land invite people into their vineyard?
How can you make a place,
where a community and its members realize a sense of life, nourishment beauty, repair, and giving back?
where they experience refuge, shelter, belonging, responsibility, truer freedom in this season of life?
where you find good work, truer vocation, and just being with God, others, the earth, yourself?
The work we hope to continue doing with Wild Indigo Guild of ‘designing restoration’ can help you discover examples of gardens, landscapes, and community projects that guide, inspire, energize and encourage you to not simply replicate or imitate them, but to discover the divine invitation for you, you community and your place to enter and work toward places of nourishment, quiet, life, repair, compassion, gratitude, beauty, justice, community.
Ascension-tide Sermon, by John Creasy
Acts 1:6-14
1:6 So when they had come together, they asked him, “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?”
1:7 He replied, “It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority.
1:8 But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”
1:9 When he had said this, as they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight.
1:10 While he was going and they were gazing up toward heaven, suddenly two men in white robes stood by them.
1:11 They said, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.”
1:12 Then they returned to Jerusalem from the mount called Olivet, which is near Jerusalem, a Sabbath day’s journey away.
1:13 When they had entered the city, they went to the room upstairs where they were staying: Peter, and John, and James, and Andrew, Philip and Thomas, Bartholomew and Matthew, James son of Alphaeus, and Simon the Zealot, and Judas son of James.
1:14 All these were constantly devoting themselves to prayer, together with certain women, including Mary the mother of Jesus, as well as his brothers.
How far is heaven from earth? How separate is the physical world from the spiritual? How separate is the profane from the sacred? Here’s another question… have you ever had an experience where God felt extremely close? Have you ever had a mystical experience. Maybe it was your conversion experience, maybe in your baptism, for many people it is through subtle but powerful experiences of God in the natural world.
In our scripture the disciples are interested in one thing… the restoration of the Israelite kingdom. That’s what they were hoping for all along… that’s what they thought Jesus would do when he rode a donkey into Jerusalem. But… they were disappointed when he was killed on a cross, when their hopes and dreams came crashing down. Then Jesus reappeared, he had risen! And so their hopes for a restored kingdom were restored! I love Jesus’ response here, basically he says we can’t know about those things… it’s all up to God and God’s not telling his secrets.
The disciples instead will receive the power of the Holy Spirit, that’s not what they asked for, but it’s what God had planned. The power of the holy spirit. For the disciples, this was a first time experience. God’s spirit would ignite the lives of the disciples and this would be far better than a restored Jerusalem, far better than an overthrow of the Roman Empire. God’s Spirit would equip the apostles to bear witness to Jesus throughout Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria and throughout all the world! This was the purpose of Jesus, the the restoration of everything.
Then… the impossible happens. The physical body of Jesus ascends to Heaven.
This is the ascension.
I grew up in a Christian tradition that celebrated Easter as the pinnacle of the salvation story. Next of importance was Good Friday. The death and resurrection of Jesus were paramount to the salvation of humanity. That’s all good… but maybe the bookends of Jesus’s life are just as important… if not more. The incarnation and the ascension.
For me, the incarnation and the ascension of Jesus demonstrate Christ’s redemption of all creation. Lets first think for a minute about the incarnation… about Christmas and its meaning. In my evangelical upbringing Christmas was not very important. I mean, sure, it was for all the kids and families, but theologically I was told that Christmas was way less important than Good Friday and Easter. In Eastern Orthodox theology the incarnation is paramount. God becomes fully human, fully descending to the physical. God becomes dust. Can we just let that sink in for a moment? The creator of all… the I AM… the one who is in all, through all, with all… became the same as us all… a body made of carbon, nitrogen, cells and organs. The God of the universe became the universe by becoming one human being. I can’t explain it. We can only dwell with this miracle and have faith that it is true.
Just as we all remember that we were made of dust and we will return to dust on Good Friday, God is formed of the dust of the earth. What this means for all creation cannot be under-stated!
The miracle of the incarnation is made complete in the ascension. In the ascension the dust of the earth… as the body of Jesus… is raised up to God. God becoming one with all creation through the body of one human being leads me to believe that all of creation just might be raised up to God, united with God, restored and redeemed. The ascension of Jesus’ body is the union of all that is physical with all that is Divine. Sit with that for a while… maybe the rest of your life.
The Angels explain that there’s no reason for the disciples to stand looking up to heaven, looking for Jesus to come back down, or something. But they do say that Jesus will return in the same way he just left. We can read about a foreshadowing of this return in Revelation when God comes to earth and Jerusalem is raised up at the same time and they meet. God and the earth meet halfway. Again, demonstrating the kingdom of God bringing unity and redemption to the physical world. In Revelation, again, just like in the ascension, heaven and earth meet and are made one.
The disciples are transformed by this vision… this idea that Jesus ascended and will return. They are to bring this incredible news to all the world. And so… they pray. This is the right response. They get it right this time. The disciples, including the men and the women, devote themselves to prayer… to inner transformation. They are transformed by their experience of Jesus’ ascension. And that inner transformation through prayer leads them to proclaim the good news throughout all the world!
How are you changed by the cosmic, universal, grandiose vision of the ascension of Jesus. The disciples received the “power of the holy spirit.” You have the power of the holy spirit to bring good news to all of creation! I think the response of the disciples is our best response when we realize just how big this good new is. Prayer. And just like the disciples prayer and inner transformation lead to works of good news in this world.
How far is heaven from earth? How separate is the physical the world from the spiritual? How separate is the profane from the sacred? The ascension answers these questions.
There is no separation.